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NASA's InSight Mars lander spacecraft in a Lockheed Martin clean room near Denver. (credit: Lockheed Martin)

NASA announced Wednesday that it will attempt to launch its InSight mission to Mars in 2018, two years after its original launch date, after engineers discovered problems with the spacecraft's seismometer system. The decision is a win for Mars scientists because there had been some concern that NASA would have to cancel the mission due to cost overruns.

"The science goals of InSight are compelling," said John Grunsfeld, associate administrator for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. "The quest to understand the interior of Mars has been a longstanding goal of planetary scientists for decades. We're excited to be back on the path for a launch."

The seismometer itself worked fine, but several times during the last summer and fall engineers found a leak in the 22cm sphere that creates a vacuum so that the instrument can function on the harsh surface of Mars. Their temporary fixes didn't address the problem. Now NASA and the French seismometer manufacturer Centre National d'Études Spatiales believe they have found a permanent fix for the recurring leak.

(credit: Khan AO, Aldahmesh MA, Ghadhfan FE, Al-Mesfer S, Alkuraya FS)

Cataracts—the clouding of the lens in our eyes—are the leading cause of blindness in the world. Though we often associate them with the elderly, they're also a major cause of vision loss in infants, especially in the developing world. In either case, they are dealt with surgically, by removing the entire lens and replacing it with either a transplanted lens or an artificial one.

More than twenty million people undergo this surgery annually, but it often comes with a host of complications, and children in particular usually still need glasses afterward. But now some researchers have shown that it's possible to skip the replacement lens and get stem cells to repair the damage, a procedure that results in fewer complications.

Researchers in China noticed that the eye contains lens epithelial stem/progenitor cells (LECs) that continue to divide, even in forty-year-old adults. Injury can stimulate them to grow into three-dimensional, transparent, light refracting, lens-like structures. Rather than using artificial lenses, these researchers thought, maybe they could get infants to regrow their own new lenses.

Not that kind of crack. (credit: Geoff Parsons)

The custom firmware that the FBI would like Apple to produce in order to unlock the San Bernardino iPhone would be the most straightforward way of accessing the device, allowing the federal agency to rapidly attempt PIN codes until it found the one that unlocked the phone.

But it's probably not the only way to achieve what the FBI wants. There may well be approaches that don't require Apple to build a custom firmware to defeat some of the iPhone's security measures.

The iPhone 5c used by the San Bernardino killers encrypts its data using a key derived from a combination of an ID embedded in the iPhone's processor and the user's PIN. Assuming that a 4-digit PIN is being used, that's a mere 10,000 different combinations to try out. However, the iPhone has two protections against attempts to try every PIN in turn. First, it inserts delays to force you to wait ever longer between PIN attempts (up to one hour at its longest). Second, it has an optional capability to delete its encryption keys after 10 bad PINs, permanently depriving access to any encrypted data.

(credit: Shawn Collins)

It was just days ago when the federal judge presiding over the upcoming Oracle v. Google API copyright trial said he was concerned that the tech giants were already preparing for a mistrial—despite the fact that the San Francisco jury hasn't even been picked yet. US District Judge William Alsup said he was suspicious that, during the trial, the two might perform intensive Internet searches on the chosen jurors in hopes of finding some "lie" or "omission" that could be used in a mistrial bid.

To placate the judge's fears, Google said (PDF) it won't do Internet research on jurors after a panel is picked for the closely watched trial, set to begin on May 9.

"The Court stated that it is considering imposing on both sides a ban on any and all Internet research on the jury members prior to verdict. Provided the ban applies equally to both parties, Google has no objection to imposition of such a ban in this case," Google attorney Robert Van Nest wrote to the judge in a Tuesday filing.

Amazon has signed a lease on 20 Boeing 767 freighter planes, according to Reuters. This comes at a time when the company has been making quiet moves to invest in a variety of logistics-focused services, presumably to gain more control over how and when its packages are delivered.

A big part of Amazon’s value proposition is that it can get items to customers fast enough that they’d prefer to buy the item online as opposed to in a brick-and-mortar store. The company has experimented with conveniently located lockers in city centers, and it has proposed schemes to deliver items via drone.

In January, Amazon China also registered to become an “ocean freight forwarder,” essentially giving the company the right to subcontract shipments from China to the US. An Amazon-owned subcontracting permit would help the company compete with other overseas suppliers and could give the company a leg-up if it wanted to get into the logistics industry.

(credit: Tyler Irving/Boyang Zhang/Kevin Soobrian)

To go along with mini thinking brain balls grown in lab, researchers have built functional, tiny organs as well—inching closer to the possibility of stitching together teeny-weeny Frankenstein monsters.

While the sci-fi-esque idea of full petri-dish people is just silliness (for now), miniaturized body parts could be highly useful for testing the safety and effectiveness of new drugs—perhaps someday replacing animal testing and some aspects of human trials, researchers speculate. And, in tests with prototypes of tiny, functional livers and hearts, researchers showed that the wee organs could successfully be implanted into living animals. The findings, reported in Nature Materials, suggest that the itsy-bitsy tissues could be used to repair full-sized organs some day, as well as for drug development.

While other lab-made mini organs have come before them, the new design offers a notable improvement to previous versions: vasculature and cell-to-cell connections.